Grateful Dead

Road Trips

Road Trips is something a little different. We want to plug in a few more pieces of the Grateful Dead puzzle by putting the spotlight on different tours and series of shows that have been neglected through the years.

Every Road Trips release will come with a beautifully designed booklet containing an essay about how the music on the discs fits into the Dead’s long history, plus many rare and never-before-seen photographs. Plus rarities from the deepest corners of the vault, multitrack releases, box sets, DVDs, downloads and who-knows-what-else.

For the second volume in our new Road Trips series, we’ve chosen another tour that was not tapped previously through Dick’s Picks—a blazing swing through the Southwest, Colorado and down to Louisiana during the first weeks of October 1977.>>more

If you’re up on your Dick’s Picks releases—and we know you are—you’ll recall that Dick’s Picks 35, released in 2005, featured some smokin’ performances from the summer of 1971. The master reels from which it was culled, long believed to have been lost, had turned up miraculously on a houseboat owned by the parents of former GD keyboardist Keith Godchaux, discovered more than 30 years later by Keith’s brother, Brian, and son, Zion.>>more

The group was feeling totally jazzed when they got back from Egypt, and Bill Graham, who had been on the trip abroad as a spectator, rather than as promoter, wanted to give the band’s hometown fans a taste of the Egypt experience by hosting a series of five shows at Winterland that would include a slide show depicting the group’s amazing adventures in Cairo and beyond. >>more

To kick off Volume 2 of our Road Trips series, we're making our first foray into the '90s-specifically, the extraordinary Madison Square Garden run from September of 1990! You'll recall the unusual historical circumstances surrounding this famous series of shows: In July, Brent Mydland had died tragically after a glorious 11-year stint as the Dead's keyboardist. With both the band and Dead Heads in shock, a few planned summer shows... >>more

It was one of the coolest Valentine’s Day celebrations ever. In the winter of 1968, the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service embarked on their first major tour of the Pacific Northwest. Now, this wasn’t an era when bands traveled in plush custom tour buses and stayed in luxury hotels. Rather it was a caravan of funky cars and semi-dilapidated equipment trucks bombing up Interstate 5 from the Bay Area to... >>more

Can it really be more than 35 years since the Grateful Dead unveiled one of their most audacious (and successful!) experiments—the legendary Wall of Sound? Why, it seems like only yesterday that I was cowering in fear worrying that one of Phil’s bass bombs was going to topple the impressive array of speaker towers that sprawled across the Dead’s enormous stage and rose to a height of more than two stories!... >>more

If you were ever lucky enough to attend a Grateful Dead concert at Cal Expo Amphitheatre in Sacramento, you already know that it was one of the cooler places the band played in the ’80s and ’90s, as special in its own way as more celebrated venues. Cal Expo was essentially a big grass field with simple grandstands in the back—nothin’ fancy, but a truly wonderful place to hang with your friends and hear some great music... >>more

The latest installment in our Road Trips series, now entering its third big year (and ninth release overall) is bound to become a favorite. Road Trips Vol. 3, No. 1 is the complete show from December 28, 1979, part of the sparkling run that has already given us the excellent Dick’s Picks: Vol. 5 (from 12/26/79). >>more

Years before Willie Nelson called it home, and decades before South By Southwest gave it international hip cache, Austin was Texas’only hippie-tolerant city. It had bohemian coffee houses and clubs that served up psychedelic bands playing in front of mind-bending light shows. So is it any wonder that Austin was the first city in Texas to really take a shine to the Good Ol’ Grateful Dead? >>more

Can it really be 40 years since Workingman’s Dead was released? Why, it feels like only yesterday that "Uncle John’s Band" first started wafting out over the FM airwaves, spreading its warm smile coast to coast and announcing to the world that the Good Ol’ Grateful Dead were now traveling to some cool new spaces (in addition to most of their deliciously weird old ones). >>more

In May of 1980, the Grateful Dead were on a roll. Brent Mydland had been in the band for a solid year by that point and was showing more grit and confidence with each tour. Whether wailing on the B-3, plinking away at the electric piano or bending notes (and minds) with his arsenal of warm and wonderful analog synths, Brent was helping the Dead turn a new musical corner. And those harmonies—when had the Dead ever sounded so good?. >>more

Without a doubt one the coolest places the Dead played that year was the Seminole Indian Reservation in Hollywood, Florida, just north of Miami, at a rock festival known as the Big Rock Pow Wow, May 23-25, 1969. The Dead headlined the first two days of the festival, and their complete sets from the Pow Wow, recorded by the Dead’s inimitable soundman in that era—Owsley "Bear" Stanley—are spread across the three discs that constitute Road Trips Vol. 4, No. 1. Whoo-hoo! >>more

You all know about the glory that was 1987. A year after we almost lost Jerry to his diabetic coma in the summer of ’86, the Dead were back, Jerry was the phoenix risen, and the band was bigger than ever: There was "Touch of Grey," In the Dark, the stadium tour with Dylan, a huge influx of new Heads; it was good times all around, for sure. The band was revived and a new day dawned!

It’s been a while since we’ve dipped into the uniformly magnificent fall of 1973 (the epic Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings came out three long years ago), and we’ve never put out a Road Trips from that year, so it’s high time we did! And you’ll have a high time getting lost in the majesty and mystery of Road Trips Vol. 4, No. 3, which consists of the entire November 21, 1973 concert at the Denver Coliseum spread across two-and-half discs, and then an excellent sequence of tunes from the second set of the previous night’s Denver show (11/20/73)!

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